Cyber warfare refers to gaining access to computer systems to cause disruptions, gather intelligence, or the like. Computer network operations (CNO) are actions taken by organizations to protect, defend and respond to cyber threats and adversaries. Accordingly, CNO involves using a complex hardware and software infrastructure to gain information superiority over adversaries and to deny adversaries this same superiority.
Computer network operations leverage information in different ways to exploit target systems. For example, offensive computer operations (OCO) include an ability to disrupt or destroy target computer systems and information capabilities. Computer network defense (CND) refers to leveraging information to prevent, identify, analyze, monitor, and respond to cyber-attacks. Computer network exploitation (CNE) is related to OCO and refers to gathering necessary information to proliferate effective attacks.
Specifically, offensive computer operations generate intelligence by collecting data from targeted computer systems and analyze the collected data to determine information of interest. This form of intelligence gathering utilizes technology from various information technologies (IT) such as computer science, computer forensics and vulnerability research. Computer forensics refers to examining digital media to identify, preserve, recover, analyze and present information extracted therefrom. Vulnerability research is a practice in computer security to identify weaknesses in a computer system that can be exploited by adversaries.
Organizations that conduct CNO must develop a robust and diverse infrastructure of capabilities, including hardware and software. CNO infrastructure must withstand various demands that include maintaining, managing and monitoring disparate capabilities. In conventional systems, several CNO applications are utilized to conduct specific OCO processes. For example, different applications may be used to find a target computer system, breach the target, collect data and analyze the collected data. Accordingly, organizations use diverse capabilities to effectively conduct computer network operations.
CNO organizations quickly become inundated with hardware, software, complex management practices and information such as metadata. These issues are further exacerbated with routine updates or maintenance of individual capabilities. Unfortunately, time spent maintaining properly operating capabilities means that less time is spent actually conducting network operations because of frequent interruptions and downtime.
Conventional CNO organizations routinely experience a loss of mission opportunity, which refers to losing critical opportunities to collect and analyze data from target computer systems due to interruptions caused by routine maintenance, management and monitoring. In addition, conventional CNO organizations must increase personnel to troubleshoot each distinct capability. Consequently, CNO organizations are plagued with overhead costs due to increased staffing and training required for diverse capabilities that must be made available for conducting effective mission operations. Moreover, maintaining a library of capabilities operated by increasing staff creates security gaps that can be exploited by adversaries. For example, deploying routine processes for CNO applications may expose a CNO infrastructure to adversaries because these processes necessarily utilize unsecured networks to access target computer systems. Moreover, expertise for each capability is frequently isolated to a few individuals that may leave the organization and/or assist adversaries. Thus, a need exists for a system that optimizes a CNO infrastructure to securely permit maintenance, management and monitoring of diverse capabilities in a harmonized manner.